RANO RARAKU, Easter Island — As remnants of a vanished culture and a lure to tourists, the mysterious giant statues that stand as mute sentinels along the rocky coast here are the greatest treasure of this remote place.

Commercial and political interests on Easter Island want to unearth and restore more of the moai, but many residents of the island regard the possibility with a mixture of suspicion and dread.

For local people, though, they also present a problem: what should be done about the hundreds of other stone icons scattered around the island, many of them damaged or still embedded in the ground?

Commercial and political interests, as well as some archaeologists, would like nothing better than to restore more — or perhaps eventually all — of the moai, as the statues are known. But many residents of Rapa Nui, the Polynesian name for Easter Island that is favored here, regard that possibility with a mixture of suspicion and dread.

“We don’t want to become an archaeological theme park, a Disney World of moai,” Pedro Edmunds Paoa, the mayor of Hanga Roa, the island’s largest settlement, said in an interview. “If we are going to keep on restoring moai there has to be a good reason to do so.”

The repaired and re-erected moai on display to visitors at
the most popular half-dozen or so sites around Easter Island amount to
fewer than 50. But estimates of the total number unearthed on the
island have now climbed to more than 900 and keep growing as
excavations continue, with nearly half of that total found at the
hillside quarry at Rano Raraku, where the island’s original inhabitants
mined and carved the statues out of compressed volcanic ash.

“Having so many is both a blessing and a curse,” said Jo Anne Van
Tilburg, an American archaeologist who has worked here since 1982 and
is the director of the Easter Island Statue Project. “Some are already
lost, of course, but because there are so many, decisions are going to
have to be made about which ones to save.”

Many of the island’s 3,800 residents argue that the moai
already restored are sufficient to ensure a constant flow of tourists,
the island’s main source of income. Tourism here zoomed to more than
45,000 visitors in 2005 from 6,000 in 1990 as airline flights have
increased, but the influx is viewed as a mixed blessing because it has
resulted in strains on public services and natural resources.

To restore even more statues, local critics argue, would only divert
scarce resources from other scientific work that could reveal more
about the culture that existed here for 1,000 years before the Dutch
landed on Easter Sunday of 1722.

Nearly half of the island, which is about three times the size of
Manhattan and has been part of Chile since 1888, has been set aside as
a national park and is thus off limits to settlement and development.
An additional 30 percent is a former sheep ranch, now in the hands of
the Chilean government, whose use is also restricted, to the
frustration of the island’s inhabitants.

Easter Island contains an estimated 20,000 archaeological sites, of
which about 40 percent have been destroyed or damaged. But the more
land that is protected or set aside for archaeological investigations,
the less that is available to island residents for their own
livelihoods.

“Some people complain, ‘Oh, I can’t plant, because some
archaeologist says I need to protect that stone,’ ” said Sergio Rapu, a
former governor and an archaeologist who has studied and taught at
several American universities. “Others care more about their horses
than the petroglyphs that the horses are trampling.”

Still, many of the people of Rapa Nui regard the moai as a
nearly sacred link to their ancestors, thousands of whom were carried
off into slavery by raids from Peru in the 19th century or died in
epidemics. If they prefer to leave things as they are, one reason may
be that they are not satisfied with what they have observed so far.

“Our elders ask what possible reason there can be to restore more moai,
when we can see that those that have been restored are deteriorating
more rapidly than those that are broken and still lying on the ground,”
Mr. Edmunds said. “By exposing them to rain, salt, lichens and
chemicals you merely make things worse.”

The best-known of the recent moai restoration projects took
place in the 1990s and was underwritten with much fanfare by a Japanese
company, which supplied a crane and other equipment. The job of
maintaining many of the statues has been undertaken by German and
American companies, which have also come in for criticism.

“To be blunt, the big chemical companies are doing experiments
here,” said Cristián Arévalo Pakarati, a deputy of Ms. Van Tilburg and
a native Rapanui. “They are not offering guarantees that there will not
be collateral effects 30 years down the line.”

In addition, Chilean government officials estimate that it costs at least $500,000 to restore and maintain a single moai. “With more than 900 moai
on the island, you do the math,” Mr. Edmunds said. “We’re talking about
$500 million when I don’t have even a million dollars in my budget and
a lot of people on Rapa Nui complain about being abandoned by the
state.”

There have also been complaints about researchers who have failed to
explain to local people what they are doing or to include them in their
projects. “In the past the lack of jobs made local people not receptive
to excavations,” said Francisco Torres Hochstetter, director of the
island’s sole archaeological museum. “There was a lot of distrust,
which even led to some people being detained while doing field work.”

Part of the debate may simply stem from sheer fatigue with
archaeology and archaeologists. Ever since an expedition led by Thor
Heyerdahl landed here 50 years ago, Easter Island has been a magnet not
just for archaeologists, but also anthropologists, ethnographers,
musicologists, botanists, biologists and art historians.

“As Rapanui we are tired of people coming here, investigating us and
then going away with a ‘Ciao!’ and not giving anything back,” Mr.
Arévalo Pakarati said. “What did Heyerdahl really leave behind for us?
You have to share the benefits and not just leave me a chocolate bar.
Those days are over.”